The Alphabet House

Jussi Adler-Olsen

Adler-Olsen takes a very different departure from his Department Q series (The Marco Effect, 2014) with this tense stand-alone. In January 1944, British Royal Air Force pilots Bryan Young and James Teasdale are shot down over Germany behind enemy lines. They barely escape by jumping aboard a passing hospital train transporting SS officers, killing two patients, and assuming their identities. They are then brought to a bleak mental ward called the Alphabet House (so named for the lettered codes the Nazis assigned disabilities). Desperate to plot an escape while concealing their sanity amidst brutal experimental electroshock treatments, The Alphabet House is a pitch-perfect, atmospheric thriller.

The Outsiders

Gerald Seymour

MI5 officer Winnie Monks has never forgiven the death of a young agent on her team, Damian Fenby, at the hands of a former Russian Army major turned gangster. Now, ten years later, she learns that the major is traveling to a villa in Spain's Costa del Sol, so Winnie finds an empty surveillance property near the major's, the Villa Paraiso, as a base for her darker, less official plans. But it turns out the villa’s owners have invited a young British couple to house-sit while they are away, and when the Secret Service arrives on their trip to paradise, everything changes. From the author of The Dealer and the Dead (2014).

Touch

Claire North

For readers who were wondering what North could possibly do to follow up The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), here's your answer: not a sequel to that mind-bending novel but something just as memorable. Dying after being viciously beaten by a vagrant in a dark alley, Kepler discovers he can jump into another person’s body with just a touch, and ultimately sets out on a mission of vengeance when one of his bodies is brutally assassinated. Kepler discovers that there is a group of people who are dedicated to eradicating the world of people like Kepler--a mission that involves killing the ghosts’ physical hosts. “We can’t wait to see what Claire North comes up with next,” writes Booklist Reviews.